Daniel Dewar and Gregory Gicquel: Ecole Municipale Des Beaux-Arts.On the outskirts of Paris, in Gennevilliers, a UFO UFO: see unidentified flying objects. (United Functions and Objects) A programming language developed by John Sargeant at Manchester University, U.K. has crash-landed: a gigantic S/M S-M or S/M abbr. sadomasochism S/M n abbr (= sadomasochism) → S/M manta ray, all studded and jagged, in a tangle of piercings, black rubber, sharp metal, and silicone messily applied with a spatula. A menacing nightmare with a strange and foreign beauty conceived by the Nantes/Paris duo Daniel Dewar and Gregory Gicquel. These two, both barely thirty, have erected the homemade into a methodology whose results are always perfect--painstakingly measured and finely tuned. Some of their early pieces, from 2002, resembled handcrafted hand·craft n. Variant of handicraft. tr.v. hand·craft·ed, hand·craft·ing, hand·crafts To fashion or make by hand. hand·craft readymades, carbon copies of Nike tennis shoes or BMX bike frames, whose aesthetic was somewhere between that of a neighborhood hardware store and an aisle full of glossy products from a multinational chain. There were electric guitars, too (but made of wood), as well as skateboards and motorcycle helmets in the Arts and Crafts arts and crafts, term for that general field of applied design in which hand fabrication is dominant. The term was coined in England in the late 19th cent. as a label for the then-current movement directed toward the revivifying of the decorative arts. style. In this workshop logic, they humorously repudiate the Duchampian notion of the readymade, which gives the artist the role of naming; their production reintroduces the "handmade" and all its attendant artistic know-how right back into the heart of the industrial chain. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Since then, while they have continued to produce semifigurative objects, like the wrought iron golf club, Big Bertha (all works 2006), also shown at Gennevilliers, which leans against a fireplace and, thus positioned, takes on the appearance of a poker, their sculptures have generally taken a more mysterious, almost Surrealist turn. While the fabrication process remains the same (they never balk at getting their hands dirty, testing out ceramics, wood, resin, even stone), it is no longer at the forefront. These days, they serve their bizarre and composite works raw, for instance the disproportionately large necklace made of turquoise ceramic beads and the charred wooden motorcycle helmets in The Hairdresser's Birthday Treat, or the kitschy wood carving of an Austin Mini stuck in a gigantic seashell See C shell. in Cocoa Turismo. "Is this ethnic art brut another monstrous effect of a savage globalization?" asked the French art critic Emilie Renard in a press release for "Hyperstyle," a group show she organized at Loop in Berlin in 2004, in which Dewar and Gicquel took part. The question is hard to answer, since their work seems to elude categorization, or even periodization Periodization is the attempt to categorize or divide time into discrete named blocks. The result is a descriptive abstraction that provides a useful handle on periods of time with relatively stable characteristics. . Master builders of a hybrid, plastic universe that is at once exotic, aquatic, decorative, and ethnic, the wild duo of Dewar and Gicquel are bringing still life, and in particular the vanitas
In the arts, vanitas genre, into sculpture, and thereby helping to reinvent the medium. You might say they offer a third way into sculpture, which is certainly in vogue today but somewhat stuck between a melancholic mel·an·chol·ic adj. 1. Affected with or being subject to melancholy. 2. Of or relating to melancholia. hyperrealism hy·per·re·al·ism n. An artistic style characterized by highly realistic graphic representation. hy (Ron Mueck) and a lavish, sometimes flashy Pop minimalism (Gary Webb, Jim Lambie). With Dewar and Gicquel, by contrast, form (despite being ultraseductive) is never vacant but opens the door to other stories, even the craziest ones. Translated from French by Jeanine Herman. |
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